Daniel, the last member of our line-up, was escorted into a little room off to the side, where apparently a TSA agent hand-scanned him. Timothy said not to worry, that they often pulled someone over to do an ultra-intensive search, but I’d thought the TSA had been eying Daniel strangely, like they thought he was a terrorist or something equally horrid.
When we were passing through the check point, I’d noticed that Daniel had taken off his necklace with assorted charms and feathers, and put it onto the moving inspection site. Daniel had even showed the agents, when asked, the card which gave him permission to wear such a thing since there were animal teeth and bird feathers on the necklace. (One feather, Daniel had told me earlier was a cast-off from a real Golden Eagle.)
I guess the necklace might have made the agents suspicious of Daniel or perhaps it was the guarded look on his face or the way he carried himself like a secret agent (I had to admit that at first, I’d thought that Daniel looked kind of scary.)
Anyway, in the end, Daniel came out with a smile on his face, which meant that we’d all passed our inspection in order to fly to Florida.
On the other side of what Terry hissingly called “purgatory,” for which Bob gave him a pretend elbow in the ribs, Timothy headed us toward the Delta Sky Club. I had no idea what that meant. Was it a gym? Was it a place to play ping pong? When I asked, Timothy just snorted at my guesses, gave me a gentle smile, swung his arm around me, and said, “Wait ‘til you see it. You’ll be impressed.”
We walked through an area where the seats were crammed with people, carry-on baggage, coats, and paper sack purchases. Someone had dropped their cola, and a big wet patch remained — part river, part sticky steps that led away from it. Candy wrappers and spilled popcorn were overflowing from a garbage can we passed, and a crying baby was perfuming the area with a pooped diaper. But the worst of it all was the noise level, like a stadium full of echoing voices.
We kept walking forward and passed a woman’s restroom. I told Timothy I was ready to visit it, but my husband asked if I could wait a couple of minutes, so we continued our long, long hike through the halls of the terminal.
Finally, we reached the Delta Sky Club. No ping pong tables, no gym, no overflowing crowds, but oh, my! It was like entering a bubble of peace where people sat about leisurely in dignified and comfortable arm chairs. The place was a library of quiet with the most incredible smells of food, the kind not salted, greased, or junk food guilt-making.
If Terry was right about having passed through purgatory at the inspection site, I was pretty sure that we’d suddenly successfully made it into Heaven!